Letter from the Editor: Ridley Park is stronger than the storm

By PHIL HERON

Sunday, July 14, 2013

The story, as they so often do, started with a phone call.

A lot of people around Delaware County can attest to the fact that the editor of the Daily Times picks up his own phone. Inevitably, they seem surprised when they call that they are actually talking to me.

I'm not sure why, but they always seem a bit taken aback. We're a community newspaper, folks. If you see me in the Wawa (I'm a plain black with sugar kind of guy), by all means, say hello. Of course, you might get my standard reply when someone on the street notices me and asks, "Aren't you the editor of the Daily Times?"

My reply? "That depends on who wants to know."

Not so with phone calls. People who call the newspaper usually want one of two things. They either are hoping to get something into the paper or endeavoring desperately to be sure something does NOT get in the paper or on the website.

I don't know who they expect to pick up the phone, but it always catches them by surprise when I answer. No, my executive assistant is not on vacation. He or she does not exist.

Add Bob White to the list. He called a week or so ago to tell me about the plight suffered by some family members. Their home in Ridley Park had been struck by lightning. And that wasn't even the bad part. What happened next was. A subsequent fire destroyed most everything they owned.

I know that we had done a story about the nasty storm that rolled through the county, it was the first of a weeklong series of storms that seemed to arrive every day in the late afternoon. I agreed with White that it would make a pretty good follow-up story.

But I was especially intrigued by a couple of other things White pointed out. First, he lamented the amount of "negative" stories that appear in the paper. It's a pretty common complaint. He offered his daughter's saga as something to counter that, not so much that their lives had been turned upside down by the fire, but by what happened afterward.

White noted that he was amazed at how their friends and the Ridley Park community had rallied around the young couple. A next-door neighbor offered an apartment where the couple and their three boys, one of whom suffers from cystic fibrosis and another who was struck by a car and suffered a broken leg, could stay while their home was undergoing repairs.

That's when it struck me: Stronger Than The Storm.

Let me try to explain.

The tumblers in my head have a tendency to boil down stories into three or four words.

We call them headlines.

Regardless of how complicated a story might be, I know that if it is going to be our lead story, it likely will need to be boiled down to maybe four words.

Of the many tasks I perform here each day, that's still the most important one. Think of our front page as something of a billboard, enticing people to check out what's inside. That's part of that headline's job -- to get people to notice and, hopefully, to plunk down a buck (yes, it's been a while since we were the 'Dime Times') to buy a copy.

That's not always an easy task. In fact, it's something of a dying art. If you are reading our lead story online on DelcoTimes.com, you likely will not see the same headline we use in print. That's because the methodology we use to write headlines online is different. The online world is steeped in something called SEO. That stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is tied into the way people search the web for information. We do things with headlines online that we'd never do in print. Likewise, the heds we use in print often don't work online.

But I love them nonetheless.

When Bob White first started to tell me about the travails of the Dugan family, I knew it sounded like a good story. But it wasn't until after he started talking about the reaction in Ridley Park that I knew it was going to be a good headline.

There was something else at play, as well, which I might as well admit now. The timing was right.

The story coincided with a long holiday weekend. With the Fourth of July falling on a Thursday, we faced the prospect of trying to develop content for five days through the weekend with just a skeleton staff.

That's why I decided to hold the story about the Dugans a few days until last Monday morning. There was another reason, as well. I loved that headline.

We have been barraged with ads since spring assuring us that all was well at the Jersey shore and the doors were open for summer visitors. Everywhere you looked, there was Gov. Chris Christie assuring us that the famed Jersey shore was "stronger than the storm."

The advertising jingle has been stuck in my head for weeks now.

So as soon as I heard the details of the Dugans' plight, I envisioned a front page that looks remarkably like last Monday's Page One.

Stronger than the storm.

Good for Ridley Park. Good for the Dugans.

And certainly good for a cranky old editor with a penchant for breaking down stories into four words.